Office 2019 Overview and Deployment Information

Office 2019 is released and there are lot things that one has to understand before you deploy Office 2019. While Office 2019 is released, we can expect more product releases such as Project Server 2019, Exchange Server 2019, Skype for Business Server 2019 etc. I am not sure when but I hope in the coming weeks. If you are a Microsoft’s volume licensing customer, you should have access to download Office 2019 deployment tool. However very soon Office 2019 should be available for other consumers as well.

You can download the latest version of Office deployment tool and download Office 2019. To deploy Office 2019 in your organization, you can use SCCM/Configuration manager. If you are planning to deploy Office 2019 using SCCM, it’s good to be on latest version of SCCM current branch. As per Microsoft, Office 2019 product should be listed in SCCM > Office 365 Client Installation wizard. Currently the product is not visible and I believe this will be made available soon.

Office 2019 Overview

If you are volume licensing customer, you should find the below Office 2019 products in the download list.

Office Professional Plus 2019

Office Standard 2019

Project Professional 2019

Project Standard 2019

Visio Professional 2019

Visio Standard 2019

There is no change in the list of Office 2019 apps that are installed except OneNote. There will be no OneNote 2019, rather the users will get OneNote 2016.

Office 2019 Deployment

If you are planning to deploy Office 2019 in your organization, then please read important points about Office 2019 deployment.

Office 2019 is only supported on Windows 10. It’s not supported on Windows 7 or Windows 8.1. So the admins now have to gear up and upgrade Windows 7/8.1 to Windows 10 if they want Office 2019.

Previous versions of Office products that were installed with Windows Installer can be uninstalled using Office Deployment Too.

You cannot run Office 2019 simultaneously with Office 2016 or older editions of Office.

Office 2019 uses Click-to-Run installation technology, while earlier versions of Office used Windows Installer (MSI) as the installation technology. Maybe all the future versions of office will use click-to-run technology.

To activate Office 2019 volume licensed products you can still use Key Management Service (KMS).

New Office Deployment Tool (ODT) is released. You can download Office Deployment Tool from here.

You can download Office 2019 using ODT. Approx size of the download is 2.12 GB.

You can install Office 2019 either from Office CDN or download the installation files from the Office CDN to a location on your local network. You can place the files on shared folder, and install Office 2019 from that location.

Most of all you have to uninstall existing versions of Office before you deploy Office 2019.

Office 2019 products are available for downloads in both 32-bit and 64-bit versions.

Office 2019 is a separate product. If you have already deployed Office 365 ProPlus in your organization, you don’t need Office 2019. The features that are in Office 365 proplus are included in Office 2019.

Regarding Office 2019 updates, you may not get new feature updates but just security updates. You must consider moving to any of the Office 365 plans to get the regular updates.